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New DIY drone build

Posted by Daniel Lukonis on March 3, 2015 at 6:58pm

Hi All! I've been busy building this new experimental screened-in drone.

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It's built out of many DIY style components. 3D printed motor mounts, rain gutter screen "finger protector rings", some spare foam, rubber damping balls, random bits of carbon fiber cut up, epoxy, hot glue and a micro apm.

My mail goal of this project was to have a fun park flyer that would be safer than open blades. I also tried to make it light and flexible. Flexible as in it can bounce off the ground and still keep going. I bounced it off the walls and floors in my home for a quick test and it works quite well.

All in all  i'm quite impressed. It is DIY so everything isn't perfect, but it gets the job done. I'm posting some more pics below. Some have the GPS installed and others don't. I didn't need it for my indoor tests when I took some of the pics.

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Comments

  • Erik Suit March 7, 2015 at 12:14am
    Do i see correctly that you are using cppm with hkpilot micro? If so, can you please explain how did you get it working? Ive been trying to do this 2 days now, no luck. And i'm a complete newbie with both apm and cppm :)
  • Daniel Lukonis March 5, 2015 at 12:25pm

    These are 5" props. I printed the upper and lower rings. The mesh turned out much stronger than anticipated. It actually acts like a spring, bendable, but rebounds to its original shape. Which is actually perfect for energy absorption. As far as physics go, I think it would definitely work for the 15" blades. I have 15" and 18" blade drones as well. I'm in the process of making something with the mesh for them. As you suggested I am also looking into carbon fiber rings.

  • John Dennings March 5, 2015 at 9:09am

    (I am thinking that carbon fiber rings with a sufficiently stiff mesh could be the ticket for a larger design, maybe with a few vertical support rods)

  • John Dennings March 5, 2015 at 8:58am

    Very nice! 

    What size props? So it looks like the mesh is rigid enough to support the upper rings. Did you print those?

    Do you think this could be scalable for larger diameter props? I've got one copter with 15"+ props I'd like to outfit with something similar, needed for close range photography/cinematography.

  • Daniel Lukonis March 4, 2015 at 3:56pm

    Hi Greg,

    The total weight including battery is 478grams. With the current motors and 3S battery it's drawing about 9 amps at hover.

  • Greg Dronsky March 4, 2015 at 5:48am

    Nice! What is the weight of the copter?

This reply was deleted.